There actually many tools which could do the job, both free and paid.

1. Xenu Link Sleuth - free, available at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

2. Screaming Frog - free (limited)/paid, available at http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

3. A1 Website Analyzer - paid, but with a fully functional trial, available at http://www.pendragonexpress.com/hop/a1

4. LinkExaminer - free, available at http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/Network/lnkexam/Freeware.htm

5. Search Engine Optimization Toolkit - free, available at http://www.iis.net/download/seotoolkit

If you just need a crawl, I would recommend 1, 4 or 5. They are both free and work fast.  If you want to optimize your content, 5 is a powerhouse.

Hope it helps.

Marcin

Generally, there's is no benefit in using shortened urls. Quite to the contrary, you would be losing a lot of that linking power.

So, don't use shortened urls for link building.

And to answer your question more generally, it's always best strategy to build backlinks both to the homepage and to some inner pages, using varying anchor text.

Hope it helps.

Hi,

it's very simple to achieve with site-wide links, for example in a sidebar or in a footer. It's quite possible that a single domain. This is exactly the case with at least one of the domains you provided, as far as I can tell after a quick look-up.

Generally, if a large site links to you with a link which is present on each page of that site (think blogroll), you can easily get thousands of links. However, their value will not be significantly stronger than a single link from the same site would hold.

Hope it helps.

Hi upick,

you can buy the domain and do a 301 redirect to your site. I've done it many times, and it is still surprisingly powerful method to quickly get the desired rankings, obviously if the domain you're 301-ing was powerful enough.

Hope it helps.

Hi,

there are a few ways you could go about this.

1. First of all, if you're an expert in this field, you will probably include a number of good keywords in a very natural way, just by knowing your stuff.

2. Try tools like ubersuggest.org - it scrapes Google Suggest quite efficiently. I believe with Google Suggest you can often find a lot of hidden gems not reported by the Google Keyword Tool.

3. Try extracting keywords from other pages which are already ranking for your target term. My favorite way of doing this is using a free Microsoft extension for Excel called Ad Intelligence, available from http://advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/adcenter-downloads/microsoft-advertising-intelligence You can use the built-in keyword wizard to paste a number of other URLs, and the tool will try to extract all related keywords. Works very well for me.

You can try a similar trick with the Google Keyword Tool, by providing a website and not a specific keyword as a seed for your research.

4. This might not be feasible / out of the budget, but running an Adwords campaign with some more generic phrases and "broad" match often helps discover a number of surprising phrases people are looking for your content.

5. Get SEOQuake for Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/seoquake-seo-extension/ - to review several top pages ranking for your keywords. Pay special attention to the "Density" report which shows you the most frequently used keywords on these pages, and to the Diagnosis report which you can use to find phrases used in meta description, meta keywords and header tags.

I hope some of these tricks will help you.

I would add to what Bryan already said that while keeping URL structure is important, or at least doing proper 301 redirects if keeping URLs is not possible, a redesign is an opportunity to improve your rankings (but also to lose them) by changing a number of on-site elements.

Keep in mind at least the following:

• unique titles

• unique meta descriptions

• proper use of h1 / h2 / h3 headers

• proper use of your target keywords in anchor text for internal links

• proper use of , and list elements

**_- proper use of alt and title tags for images

• please consider using microformats (schema.org) if they make sense in your case

• proper internal linking (analyze if all your internal pages are easily reachable. Even without changing URLs, you can still add or remove links on individual pages to improve the flow)

These are all elements which are easily changed during a redesign - for better or for worse.

Hope it helps in your decisions._**